The present invention relates as indicated to an oven for baking food products, and relates more particularly to an oven having a controlled air flow means to provide even heat distribution from top to bottom in the baking chamber.
Many convection ovens are equipped with fans capable of moving heated air throughout the baking cavity at various velocities. Normally these ovens provide a rapid distribution of air over the food products which are placed on baking pans stacked one above the other. However, the air distribution is not uniform. As a result, particularly when dough products are being baked, there is usually an uneven bake either across one pan or from pan to pan from top to bottom in the oven.
Prior to the present invention, ovens of the type described normally baked some products adequately but did not give satisfactory results for both what are termed low products such as cookies and what are termed high products such as bread. In addition, some of the pans in the oven had to be removed, rotated and put back into the oven to obtain an even bake and uniform coloring of the product.
In order to improve baking results ovens, with multiple rotating fans or larger ovens with rotating pan racks have been utilized. These units are generally more costly, require more room, and have more moving parts thereby increasing maintenance requirements. In short, in an attempt to obtain the results obtained by the present invention, prior art ovens have been characterized by being relatively complicated and thus costly, or providing a shortfall in performance, or both.